Yahoo acquires Loki Studios as part of acquisition spree

Yahoo has acquired a mobile gaming company, Loki Studios, taking its total acquisitions this month to four.

The company said over the weekend it welcomed Loki, Astrid, GoPollGo and MileWise to its growing mobile team. "We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team," the company said in a Twitter message in a possible reference to some of the people from the four companies who have moved to Yahoo.

Loki's flagship application is its location-aware game, Geomon. "We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products," the Loki team said on their website.

Earlier in the week, Yahoo also acquired GoPollGo, a social polling tool. The company's founder and team said they were moving to Yahoo, and would no longer be supporting their offerings.

It is not clear whether Yahoo has bought all these companies for their products and technology or just to get their experienced staff in the area of mobile as it tries to build up its own mobile capabilities. The way the services are being shut down suggests that their user base did not particularly interest Yahoo. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.

After Yahoo acquired Astrid, a to-do list app, earlier this month and said its team would join Yahoo, a company spokeswoman said it acquired Astrid's talent and technology. She declined to provide information on the future product roadmap or integration. Astrid would continue to work as it is for the next 90 days, and users would be advised on downloading their data, its developers said.

MileWise, which developed an app for optimizing the use of travel rewards, will also shut down its service. The MileWise team will be joining Yahoo in its New York office. "We're thrilled to be joining such a talented group of inventors, and can't wait to get working on the next big thing coming out of Yahoo," the MileWise team said on their website.

Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer has said previously that the investments in acquisitions would be small, typically costing double-digit millions and low hundreds of millions. Yahoo has not disclosed how much it paid for the four companies.

The Internet company has also made some other acquisitions in mobile including the purchase of Summly, a company in London behind a news summarization app, and a location discovery service called Alike. Yahoo said it would shut down the Summly app, but the technology would figure in some Yahoo products.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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